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October212011

“[...]Practising direct democracy

A constant complaint about the globalization movement in the
progressive press is that, while tactically brilliant, it lacks any central
theme or coherent ideology. (This seems to be the left equivalent of the
corporate media’s claims that we are a bunch of dumb kids touting a bundle of
completely unrelated causes—free Mumia, dump the debt, save the old-growth
forests.) Another line of attack is that the movement is plagued by a generic
opposition to all forms of structure or organization. It’s distressing that,
two years after Seattle, I should have to write this, but someone obviously
should: in North America especially, this is a movement about reinventing
democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of
organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization
are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal
networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations;
networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus
democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately
it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. But unlike many other forms of
radicalism, it has first organized itself in the political sphere—mainly
because this was a territory that the powers that be (who have shifted all
their heavy artillery into the economic) have largely abandoned.

Over the past decade, activists in North America have been
putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups’ own internal
processes, to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy could
actually look like. In this we’ve drawn particularly, as I’ve noted, on
examples from outside the Western tradition, which almost invariably rely on
some process of consensus finding, rather than majority vote. The result is a
rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments—spokescouncils, affinity
groups, facilitation tools, break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns,
vibe-watchers and so on—all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that
allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity,
without stifling dissenting voices, creating leadership positions or compelling
anyone to do anything which they have not freely agreed to do.